How well NixOS fits your purpose really depends on what you want to do with the OS. If you’re just going run a bunch of docker containers, you could manage them via Nix but its a little cumbersome.

Where NixOS really shines for small servers are the so called NixOS Options. They allow you to install tons of services on bare metal but manage all the configuration for you. E.g. open the correct firewalls ports, run a dedicated DB or cache, etc. and all those simply require you to enable them with an ... = true;.

Smaller projects might not have a NixOS Option available and some options are more and/or easier configurable than others, but if you’re running just a few common services you could feasibly manage your whole server with just one native config file and no docker shenanigans.

I’d recommend checking what’s available under the link above. If you wanna go the container route instead, you have the option of just using docker non-declaratively as on every other distro (but then you lose some of the benefits NixOS gives you), or you can declaratively have NixOS manage all the docker containers. There are a few ways to do and manage this so some further research will be required.

Then helmfile might be worth checking out

You dont need to manually handle the WG config files. This isn’t really an issue when it’s just you and your two devices, but once you start supporting more people, like non-technical family members, this gets really annoying really quickly.

Tailscale (and headscale) just require you to log in, which even those family members can manage and then does the rest for you. They also support SSO in which case you wouldn’t even have to create new accounts.

There are some experimental models made specifically for use with Home Assistant, for example home-llm.

Even though they are tiny 1-3B I’ve found them to work much better than even 14B general purpose models. Obviously they suck for general purpose questions just by their size alone.

That being said they’re still LLMs. I like to keep the “prefer handling commands locally” option turned on and only use the LLM as a fallback.

I’ve had this exact same gripe and can thankfully report that running EarlyOOM has fixed this for me.

Opening the app for the first time on my Fairphone 5 (listed as unsupported) actually crashed the OS, but after that it seems to be working ok.

Closing out of the in-app gallery causes the app to crash. But that can easily be worked around by using some other gallery app.

I’ll be testing it for a bit to see how it fares against other HDR methods…

Why not set up backups for the Proxmox VM and be done with it?

Also makes it easy to add offsite backups via the Proxmox Backup Server in the future.

Typst

You can use their online web-editor (similar to OverLeaf for LaTeX) or download the open-source engine and run it locally (there are extensions available for many text editors).

Compared to LaTeX I find it much more comfortable to work with. It comes with sane, modern defaults and doesn’t need any plugins just to generate a (localized) bibliography or include links.

Since Typst is very young compared to LaTeX I’m sure that there are numerous docs / workflows that can’t be reproduced at the moment but if you don’t need some special feature I’d recommend giving it a shot.

The development of Piper is being driven by the Home Assistant Project. That probably makes it one of the larger OSS TTS projects. Hope may not be lost yet ;)

I started out with WireGuard. As you said its a little finicky to get the config to work but after that it was great.

As long as it was just my devices this was fine and simple but as soon as you expand this service to family members or friends (including not-so-technical people) it gets too annoying to manually deal with the configs.

And that’s where Tailscale / Headscale comes in to save the day because now your workload as the admin is reduced to pointing their apps to the right server and having them enter their username and password.

I suspect that if you were to cut the screen at the rounded edges, the sensor island and the onscreen nav buttons you’ll be left with a 16:9 screen.

In other words its a 16:9 screen with some margin for curves and controls.